shoes made from ocean plastic

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The world is increasingly being filled with plastics. The number of petroleum based plastics that people use and come into contact with each day is staggering. My laptop that I’m typing on now is mostly plastic, my car is probably half plastic, most food items are packaged in plastics which we then carry home in plastic bags…. not to mention all the drinking water in your home that runs through PVC pipes before reaching your faucet… and then everything eventually breaks and we throw it away into the ocean.

(If you haven’t of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch then you’re in for a real treat – it’s a floating island of garbage that won’t degrade, and it’s roughly the size of Texas. Sounds healthy)

So it’s nice to see some of that floating refuge starting to get re-used in a functional way. Adidas has developed a pair of shoes (which are surprisingly attractive) made from 95% recovered ocean plastics in partnership with a non-profit organization called Parley for the Oceans. The pastel colours and soft texture definitely evoke thoughts of foamy sea waves. There is little doubt that the shoes will end up back in the ocean once they’re worn out by over enthusiastic yuppie crossfitters, and $220 is a steep price to pay for temporary ocean plastic removal, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. See what I did there? Shoe pun.

Leads me to wonder how these same materials could be reconfigured into long-lasting building materials…